Diablo 3 Platinumed

Diablo III: Reaper of Souls – Ultimate Evil Edition (English)_20160607123140

I’ve been playing Diablo 3 since it was released for PC. I remember the dark days of the Auction House, the atrocious drop rates, and playing the story mode over and over and over again. Diablo 3 was the first ARPG I’d ever played, I didn’t know any better, I liked the game for what it was. I started to drift away from the game right before Reaper of Souls was released, and had forgotten about it for a while.

I got a PS4 at the beginning of 2015 and the first game I bought for it was Diablo 3. I wanted to try out the new expansion and I thought the game would be fun on the big screen with a controller. It turns out I liked the game even more with the controller set up. I also liked the new adventure mode and I was actually getting legendary drops for my class. It was all very exciting.

Over the past year and a half I’ve been playing Diablo off and on. Its one of those games that I remember I have and proceed to play it exclusively for a month or two and then move on to something else. I always come back and it’s always just as fun as when I left off.

One of my goals for June was to Platinum the game. This involves getting all the shiny virtual trophies Sony throws at you for certain achievements. I’m not really one to trophy/achievement hunt but I was so close for this game. The only trophies I had left were  were the two grindiest. One was to get 6 characters to level 70 and the other was to complete 500 bounties.

The 6 characters were easy, one of each class and I had already leveled most of them to cap earlier. For this one I had to level up a witch doctor, which was my main on PC, and a barbarian, who I had never played before. The Witch Doctor dinged 70 after playing through the campaign again with a friend who was new to the game. I leveled the Barabarian with gem of ease on a high powered weapon in Torment 6 Adventure Mode. He died a lot but after a few kills he was gaining 5 or 6 levels at a time. Toward 60 experience really started to slow down, but he was fun to play so it didn’t feel like a grind to get the last 10 levels.

I’ve been working on the 500 bounties trophy since last summer when I found out about it. I had been playing it since January so I thought I would be somewhat close. Turns out I had only completed 150 bounties. Over the course of a year of sporadically playing I  finally knocked out the additional 350 bounties. Now I never want to do a bounty again. It’s not that bounties are hard, it’s that they’re time consuming. Completing 5 bounties took me around 20 minutes if I only ran to the objective. It was daunting to think about and after 10 I was bored and wanted to do something else. If I had been smarter I would have recruited a friend to do them with me and run two at a time but alas I haven’t had people to play with regularly until very recently.The only saving grace with the bounties is that they give much needed crafting materials as a reward. It’s not as shiny as a legendary item but it’s still worth the effort. Thankfully, after 500 I’ve gathered enough materials to stop doing them for a very long time.

Now that I have one, I don’t feel the need to achieve a platinum trophy ever again. Of course its fun to hear the ding while playing a game. I always pause to look up what I just did to get that particular trophy but I don’t actively seek them out. I’m just not really an achievement guy, unless they unlock titles…I love me some titles.